I was at our local Christian bookstore the other night and stumbled on Phil Johnson's new book so I picked it up. Here's a brief review/reaction. Perhaps others can get the book and we can have some discussion over. I'm cross-posting this on both the asa and the evolution groups.
The book is a very easy read (119 pages of text plus 12 pages of study notes). It took me just a couple of hours. The full title is "An Easy-to-Understand Guide for Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds" and its stated purpose and audience is indicated in the introduction:
"There was clearly a need for a short book aimed at a different audience, one not quite so familiar with university-lievel subjects. In particular, I wanted to write for late teens--high-school juniors and seniors and beginning college undergraduates, along with the parents and teachers of such young people."
and
"If high-schoolers need a good high-school education in how to think about evolution, professors and senior scientists seem to need it just as badly. That's what this book aims to give--a good high-school education in how to think about evolution. It's for high-schoolers, college students, parents, teachers, youth workers, pastors and also scientists whose education didn't encourage them to take a skeptical look at the claims of Darwinian theory. There isn't much scientific detail in the book, or much advanced philosophy. I've covered the science and the philosophy in my earlier books, and refer readers to the relevant chapters as appropriate."
Johnson does (and doesn't do) what he sets out to do (and not to do). The book is very much a manual in what to look out for when engaged with proponents of evolution. When Johnson is at his best (and this is true for all of his writings), he points out the materialistic and naturalistic bias of much of modern science, especially in the popular books and in "official" statements from organizations such as the National Association of Biology Teachers and the National Academy of Science. These arguments primarily focus on philosophical and religious questions involved in worldviews. I'm less sympathetic with some of his detailed critiques of evolutionary biology, but not many of them appear in this book.
Here is the Table of Contents with a summary of some of the chapters:
1. "It's only about length of time." (I assume he is distancing himself from the young-earth creationist movement here.)
2. God made the Laws and then retired.
3. Giving away the realm of reason.
Selective Use of Evidence
Appeals to Authority
Ad Hominem Arguments
Straw Man Argument
Begging the Question
Lack of Testability
Vague Terms and Shifting Definitions
"Original Sin" -- (the universal tendency to believe what we want to believe)
He then calls on Richard Feynman with quotes from his 1974 commencement speech at Cal Tech that calls on scientists to bend over backwards not to overstate their claims or to fool themselves.
The critical principles to be used in discussion/debate with Darwinists are these:
1. Learn to distinguish between what scientists assume and what they investigate.
2. Learn to use terms precisely and consistently.
3. Keep your eye on the mechanism of evolution; it's the all-important thing.
4. Learn the difference between testing a theory against the evidence and using selected bits of evidence to support the theory.
5. Learn the difference between intelligent and unintelligent causes.And in religion.
6. The problem of suffering.
7. The problem of faith.
Reading Phil Johnson is maddening. I agree with 95% of what I read. His assessment of the big picture is correct and his call to Christians to step in the modern debate with the big picture in view is, I think, the right strategy. At one point he even calls us theists to common posture against the materialist/modernists/ post-modernists governing the intellectual life of our age. (p. 92-93)
"First, I wanted to make it possible to question naturalistic assumptions in the secular academic community. Second, I wanted to redefine what is at issue in the creation-evolution controversy so that Christians, and other believers in God, could find common ground in the most fundamental issue--the reality of God as our true Creator....What all these should agree on is that God--not some purposeless material process--is our true Creator. Given that we inhabit a culture whose intellectual leaders deny this fundamental fact, we should unite our energies to affirm the reality of God. After we have had that postive experience of unity and affirmation, we may be able to talk about the remaining points of disagreement with renewed goodwill."
I for one am very sympathetic with these goals.
However, Phil has excluded some of us from the discussion. I agree with 95% of what he says, but the 5% is what excludes us. We agree on the big picture, but we disagree with some of the detailed criticisms of evolution and the inclusion of the intelligent design claim as an essential plank in the big picture. We are simply labelled as accommodationists. This exclusion occurs several times in the book--perhaps most pointedly in the first chapter where Johnson closes with these words:
"I therefore put the following simple proposition on the table for discussion: God is our true Creator. I am not speaking of a God who is known only by faith and is invisible to reason, or who acted undetectably behind some naturalistic evolutionary process that was to all appearances mindless and purposeless. That kind of talk is about the human imagination, not the reality of God. I speak of a God who acted openly and who left his fingerprints all over the evidence."
I'm not one who believes that faith in God is irrational or that the Christian faith is invisible to reason (although I do want to be careful not to elevate reason to a position where creaturely reflection passes judgment on the Creator--that's the real original sin!) However, for Phil Johnson to call my belief that God operated through secondary causes that can be analyzed by scientific methods "the human imagination, not the reality of God" is simply a provocation that calls into question centuries of reflection on how God interacts with the world and Phil Johnson's sincerity in bring all theists on board. Of course, as some of us have stated over and over again, God is involved actively in the ordinary operations of the universe. The particular combination of genes in my daughter is a consequence of chance recombination and independent assortment events, but the combination is exactly what God wanted. Anything for which we think we understand the mechanism in science is God-directed as much as any miracle for which we can't understand the mechanism. Also, but perhaps for another discussion, the natural theology that Johnson espouses in this quote, while of a long and noble tradition in the English speaking world, is one that may not have its roots in Biblical thinking.
I also want to call attention to an error that Johnson and Behe commit in criticizing Richard Dawkins (and Elliot Sober). It's a fairly minor discussion but, according to my conversations with some of the principals involved, is extremely irritating to them and gets in their way of hearing the arguments. The discussion in Johnson is on p. 74 and 75. Dawkins discusses how long it would a random process to generate the phrase "tobeornottobe" or "methinksitisaweasel" or some other intelligent phrase. Dawkins argues that if a selection mechanism is present so that the correct letter is kept when the random process finds it, that the correct phrase is generated very rapidly vs. in the infinite length of time required by the total random process. Johnson and Behe rightly point out that the process as described is both teleological and intelligently designed. However, the example is NOT to describe how mutation and selection occurred in Darwinian evolution BUT to show the power of a mutation/selection process compared to a random process. Let's aim our baloney detectors in all directions!
Finally, Phil Johnson states something in writing that I do not recall him stating so obviously in the past. (p. 94, 95)
"Granted that the materialist mechanism has to be discarded, what does this imply for what scientists call the "fact of evolution," the concept that all organisms share a common ancestor? Universal common ancestry is as much a product of materialist philosophy as is the mutation/selection mechanism....Put aside the materialism, however, and the common ancestry thesis is as dubious as the Darwinian mechanism."
It's nice to hear him come clean on this one. Some of us, while maybe critical of Darwinism as a mechanism for macroevolutionary change and certainly critical of materialism and naturalism (and thus agree with Johnson on these points), have no doubts that the overwhelming indication of the evidence is that common ancestry is true and that some kind of macroevolution did occur. For him to deny this says a lot about our disagreement and suggests that being right on the big story can blind you to the details as much as being wrong on the big story.
Read the book but don't forget to turn on your baloney detector.
Terry M. Gray
Computer Support Scientist
Chemistry Department, Colorado State University
Fort Collins, Colorado 80523
grayt@lamar.colostate.edu
http://www.chm.colostate.edu/~grayt/
August 28, 1997